All That Reaction

Red Dwarf XI/XII news makes waves.

8 May, 2015

You know, we spend so long existing in our happy little bubble of Red Dwarf fandom that it's easy to forget just what an impact the show can have in the outside world. And then something comes along that makes us remember - something like, oh, we don't know, the announcement of two brand new series?

Taking the world by surprise on an otherwise unassuming Saturday lunchtime (and comfortably overshadowing news of the birth of Princess Charlotte), the announcement was made live on stage by Doug Naylor to a whooping crowd at the Dimension Jump XVII convention before making its way to Twitter in short order. Here, in fact, is the moment of that announcement in Nottingham:

... which was cleverly joined by a near-simultaneous posting from Doug's Twitter account:

Delighted to say UKTV have commissioned two brand new series of #RedDwarf - Red Dwarf XI + Red Dwarf XII

In the meantime, however, there was also the small matter of additional detail about the new series, beyond what was established in the official announcement. Here's a roundup of some of what was said by Doug onstage at DJ - although of course we should stress that as the series is still in pre-production, plenty could change between now and the time the episodes are shot!

It wasn't just Twitter that reacted to the announcement, though: in fact, it quickly became one of the biggest television stories of recent weeks, and was covered by (deep breath) the Independent, the Evening Standard, the Radio Times, the Metro, the Mirror, the Mail, BBC News, Yahoo! News, Chortle, Digital Spy, Den of Geek, Empire and... well, a lot more publications and websites besides.

Then, of course, there was the additional news that Craig Charles would be leaving Coronation Street to concentrate on his Red Dwarf commitments - something which became front-page news of its own on Monday morning.

And all of this, of course, is just the beginning. We've got two whole years of this to look forward to before these two series even finish reaching our screens - Red Dwarf is once again alive and kicking bottom in a way that may just top everything before. Strap on in, it's going to be quite the ride...